Speakers

Topics

Blog Posts

Lavin News

The latest headlines from our world-changing keynote speakers

This past Thursday we resumed our live Twitter Q&A series with writer and cultural critic Virginia Heffernan, who, in the new book Magic and Loss, argues that the Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art—and so much greater than simply a tool for business, or a shiny bit of tech....
Continue Reading →

1. Daniel Levitin: This Is Sting’s Brain (on Music)
Back in 2007, when 80s hitmakers The Police were on their globetrotting, box-office-smashing reunion tour, they made three(!) appearances at Montreal’s Bell Centre. It was during one of these visits that lead singer Sting, having read Daniel...
Continue Reading →

Across America, it’s been a summer of turmoil and division. After shootings in Dallas, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge, protests and violence in Milwaukee, and ceaseless debate, racial tension remains at a boiling point. In his last book, Who We Be, author Jeff Chang examined racial progress in...
Continue Reading →

Congratulations are in order for design speaker John Maeda, who’s moving on after three productive years as the Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Maeda will join Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack, as their Global Head of Computational Design and...
Continue Reading →

What are the ideas and voices informing our most exciting keynote speakers? This week, we reached out to Adam Briggle, Lavin environment speaker, grassroots leader, and author of A Field Philosopher’s Guide to Fracking, and asked him a simple question: what are you reading? As it turns out, Briggle...
Continue Reading →

Last December, Michael Landsberg ended his 18-year run as the host of TSN’s Off the Record. Now, he’s free to pursue a cause that’s near and dear to him: mental health awareness. Far from the image we’re used to seeing on TV, Landsberg suffers from depression, and has for most of his adult life....
Continue Reading →

This Friday (August 19), the crime-war-comedy biopic War Dogs hits theaters, starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller (Whiplash) and Bradley Cooper. War Dogs tells the unlikely story of Efraim Diveroli and David Mackouz, two twenty-something Miami hustlers who land a massive contract to supply weapons to...
Continue Reading →

Food justice activist Bryant Terry’s talk from TEDMED 2015 is now available to watch! Terry, the author of the critically acclaimed Vegan Soul Kitchen and Afro-Vegan, spoke last November at the conference. In the video, Terry tells the story of a hip-hop song that forever changed the way he looked...
Continue Reading →

The trailer for the much-anticipated film Hidden Figures is officially out! Based on the book of the same name by new Lavin speaker Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Kevin Costner, and chronicles NASA’s female African-American...
Continue Reading →

Our lives are flooded with more information than ever before: emails, Facebook updates, push notifications, Google alerts, Tweets, texts, and even (still, somehow) telemarketers and junk mail. And if we need a question answered, Wikipedia is just a few clicks away. But how do we know what’s truth...
Continue Reading →